Ronald Dellums: “it is with an incredibly heavy heart that I take the well of the House of Representatives today because this will be the…”

“it is with an incredibly heavy heart that I take the well of the House of Representatives today because this will be the last time that I will do this. I have served in these chambers for 27 years, and it has been an extraordinary honor and high privilege to serve with all of my colleagues here. I came to Congress in January of 1971, against the backdrop of a very tumultuous era in the history of this country. The civil rights movement, the struggle for the liberation of many oppressed and downtrodden people in this country, the struggle for the liberation of women, peace in Vietnam, the notion that peace was a superior idea to war, the concern for the fragile nature of our ecological system. I came at a very unique era, at a very interesting and tumultuous period in this country. I had to try to make sense out of all the music and anger and pain that I heard in Oakland and Berkeley and in the Bay area and in the country at that time. I was not to know that Berkeley and Oakland, in the mind's eye of many people, was so extraordinary and that when people wanted to lash out at what they thought Berkeley represented at that period in American history, they could not lash out at an abstract idea or at a city, but they could lash out at that person that was the representative of that community. But I am just a guy. And if you hit me, I hurt; and if you cut me, I bleed. And there were many times when you hit me hard and you cut me deep.…”